A gulf between vision and execution has defined Ramaphosa's limping two terms in office.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Picture: Getty Images/Per-Anders Pettersson
The empty words of a failing presidency – that is the reality linking Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent G20 leadership with him last week becoming the chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
A gulf between vision and execution has defined Ramaphosa’s limping two terms in office.
His tenure at the head of the G20 was awash with flowery oratory about “sustainability”, even as intensifying military rivalry among the great powers pushed the costly net-zero ambitions that have so damaged Western economies further from practical reach.
It ended, predictably, with US President Donald Trump snubbing both the Johannesburg summit and its handover ceremony.
It is also entirely feasible that Ramaphosa will not be in Lusaka to hand over the SADC chair in August next year.
Unlike his immediate predecessor, Madagascar’s Andry Rajoelina – whose overthrow in a military coup led to Ramaphosa acting as SADC’s interim chair for the past nine months – Ramaphosa is highly unlikely to be removed from office by men in uniform.
But hanging over him is the revived Phala Phala impeachment process, even as a succession struggle gathers momentum within the ANC.
If the party performs as disastrously as expected in the elections, the pressure for his early departure may become irresistible.
A measure of the shallow intellectual waters in which the ANC is drowning is the cut-andpaste nature of Ramaphosa’s keynote speeches.
SA’s G20 presidency struggled along under the banner of Solidarity, Equality and Shared Prosperity.
SADC would be a region in which “no country and no person is left behind”.
The pledge to leave no-one behind is, of course, Ramaphosa’s signature refrain, recycled in every state of the nation address since 2010.
Unfortunately, his perfumed prose cannot mask the festering condition of SADC.
Despite being among the most richly endowed regions in the world, its economic performance has been dire.
SADC’s GDP per capita was barely $2 000 (about R32 000) in 2024 – less than one-twentieth of the European Union’s.
Much of this failure stems from SA’s inability to fulfil the economic promise of its early democratic years.
With democracy came the hope that SA would become the engine of growth within SADC, which now has 16 members.
Instead, SA’s regional economic performance has been deeply disappointing.
Six years into its 10-year development plan, SADC awards itself an overall score of just five out of 10.
SADC’s moral failure is even more damning than its economic ineptitude.
The SADC Tribunal gave citizens and businesses a regional court of last resort – a forum in which to challenge state-sponsored human-rights violations and lawlessness when their own judiciaries failed them.
That avenue survived until the tribunal dared to rule against Robert Mugabe’s government over its illegal and uncompensated seizure of agricultural land.
What SADC needs from Ramaphosa is not yet another “vision”.
It needs practical, readily implementable steps, reforms for which there will be deadlines and governmental accountability for it all.
Yet, having failed to achieve this during nearly four years as South Africa’s deputy president and more than eight as president, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that he will pull it off across the SADC region in just a year. Assuming that he lasts a year.
